Thoughts about Ruby, Rails, Hanami, Elixir, Phoenix, Emacs and Unix.
I have been building a personal agent as an MCP server in Elixir, and the transport turned out to be the interesting part. A single malformed request killed the process that owned stdin, and the fix was not the one my OTP reflexes reached for.
Another CrunchLabs kit took over an evening: a sand table that drags a ball through sand on a polar arm. I added a few parametric math patterns, and the interesting part was the one it couldn't draw.
I live in Ruby, Elixir and Emacs. A CrunchLabs label maker landed on my desk, I opened the firmware to fix two small annoyances, and it turned into a pocket pen plotter that draws Aztec friezes, spirographs and Lissajous figures.
On a whim I tried building a Roblox game in Luau, far from my usual Ruby, Elixir and Emacs, and found a real, typed, test-driven codebase hiding behind the toy reputation.
An internal DSL is just Ruby that reads like a little language of its own. RSpec, Rake and Sinatra are all built this way. Here's how to build one yourself, from a naive first cut to the clean instance_eval pattern the real ones use.
Back in 2016 I left myself a note: for simple auth in Phoenix, skip Pow and hand-roll it like the book shows. Ten years later the honest answer is different. You still don't need a heavyweight library, but you don't hand-roll it either: mix phx.gen.auth writes the code for you, and in Phoenix 1.8 it comes with magic links, sudo mode and scopes.
Blocks are everywhere in Ruby: every each, map, and File.open relies on them. Treat blocks, procs and lambdas as one idea and the iterator methods you use daily become methods you can write yourself.
Every method call in Ruby is a search. Once you can see the chain the interpreter walks (modules, prepends, singleton classes, super), the object model turns predictable.
Hanami, dry and rom have joined forces as Hanakai, a single family of Ruby tools. The first release under that banner is Hanami 3.0: built-in mailers and i18n, Minitest support, and a big jump in performance.
The GNU Emacs NS port doesn't handle mailto: links on macOS: click one while Emacs is running and nothing happens. emacs-mailto is a tiny relay app that fixes that, opening a compose buffer through whatever mail-user-agent you already use.